by M. E. Kerr
I nodded.
“Milton Merrensky, is that you?”
I shrugged. Milton Merrensky was the shyest boy in Storm. I had never even seen him at a dance. He was rumored to have an IQ of 160, and you could find him any Saturday morning down in Hogg’s Swamp, doing birdcalls, with binoculars around his neck.
Marilyn Pepper was smiling. “How did you make that head, Milton?” She had a nice smile. I didn’t say anything, and we just danced and she smiled, and when the band played a fast number she said, “I can’t dance fast ones.” I led her back to Wallflower Row. Before I walked away, I said, “Don’t forget me,” in the same low voice.
I looked out at the dancers and saw Christine with Ty. They were not dancing. She was pointing her finger at him and there was this mean expression on her face, and he was backing away. Then she was standing in the center of the dance floor alone, looking all around. I knew she was looking for me. I walked in the opposite direction, past the chaperones.
Ella Late Who Has No Fate was standing at the end of the line. She was wearing the same new blue-and-yellow dress she’d been wearing nonstop for about two and a half weeks now. I stopped in front of her and bowed low.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t dance. . . . Is it you, Adam?”
I shrugged.
She said, “Really, I don’t dance. Thank you, anyway. Is it you, Adam?”
I whispered, “Did you get my notes?”
Her face became bright red, but she was pleased, as well as slightly embarrassed—I could tell that from her expression. She said, “Pay attention to your lessons, not me.”
“You’re my inspiration,” I whispered.
“Then study!” she whispered back.
“I will!” I blew her a kiss and hurried on.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Christine heading for Wallflower Row.
I had a fine time. I danced with Sue Ellen Chayka, whose nose resembles a baboon’s (she was there with Danton Trice, who weighed in at 214 and sat out most fast numbers), and after Christine got off Wallflower Row (it didn’t take the boys in the stag line long to spot her there), I danced with Marilyn Pepper again, and got her a glass of punch before sailing off mysteriously.
After about an hour, I went out to the parking lot where some boys were smoking. I needed some fresh air after being cooped up inside that sweater. Marilyn’s brother, Peter Pepper, was standing there drinking some Strawberry Ripple Wine he had secreted in a brown paper bag.
“Thanks for being nice to my sister, Milton,” he said.
I shrugged.
He said, “Did you hear about Adam Blessing?”
I shook my head.
“Wait till you hear this,” he said.
I listened. I even took one of the cigarettes he offered me and suffered through a small coughing fit, trying to inhale nonchalantly while he gave me all the details. His father worked for the Storm Taxi Company and he had told Peter that last night he had driven this young girl to the Blessing place. He’d known Charlie wasn’t there, because he’d taken Charlie to the Burlington Airport earlier in the week. He’d said the young girl was the flashy type with dyed hair and the smell of whiskey. She’d had a suitcase with her.
“That isn’t all, either,” Peter said. “This afternoon they took her out of there in an ambulance. She’d taken sleeping pills, and she was in this fire-red negligee with fur on it, and Adam was with her!”
“Wow!” I whistled.
“Yeah. Everybody’s talking about it. I bet she’s some whore. Do you think she’s some whore?”
I shrugged and stepped on the cigarette. I went back into the gym and searched for Christine. She was dancing with Larry Brenner, who came up to her shoulder. I went up and cut in.
“Where have you been?” she said.
“Never mind that,” I said. “I just heard something wild about Adam!”
“I heard it, too. Ty told me. When Marlon gets here I’m Marlon’s date!”
“I’m Marlon’s date!” I said.
“Keep your voice down,” she said. “Don’t dance with me and shout out that you’re Marlon’s date!”
“You’re Adam’s date,” I said.
“He’s spent the night with some chorus girl!” she said.
I said, “I heard it was a whiskey-drinking whore.”
“A friend of his father’s,” she said sarcastically. “He said it was a friend of his father’s!”
“It’s a free country,” I said.
“My father was right about him. We don’t know anything about him!”
“You said yourself he was different.”
“Keep that head away from my shoulder and back!” she said.
“It isn’t easy to dance carrying your head,” I said. “You should try it sometime.”
“You’re going to pay for the way you’ve acted tonight,” she said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Was that your big toe with the corn on it again?”
“I hate you,” she said through her teeth.
“Hatred is immortal,” I said.
“I think you know more about everything than you’re admitting.”
Ty Hardin and Diane Wattley danced past us. “Hey, Mystery Man,” Ty called out. “How about some birdcalls?” He was laughing very hard.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Christine asked me.
“Rumor has it that I’m Milton Merrensky,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be seen dead with Milton Merrensky!” Christine said.
Ty Hardin called out again, “How about some birdcalls, Milton?”
“This is humiliating!” Christine said.
I made a bad attempt at a whippoorwill’s call.
“Stop it!” Christine said.
Then Peter Pepper tapped me on the shoulder. “One good turn deserves another,” he said. “May I have this dance with Christine?”
I headed immediately for the phone booths in the hall outside the gym. I decided to call the Storm hospital and see if I could reach Adam. If Adam was like a stranger to me since I’d overheard the conversation between my mother and my aunt, Adam’s father didn’t seem so unknown. I had seen him on television, and I had read about him in the gossip columns. If I were to make a guess who would be more likely to be friends with a flashy blonde smelling of whiskey, Adam or his father, I would choose the latter. I believed Adam, if no one else in Storm would. I was looking up the number of the hospital when two husky policemen, accompanied by Mr. Baird, headed down the hall. . . and then Ella Early yanked open the door of the phone booth.
“Wait!” she called to Mr. Baird. “Wait! He’s right in here. I told you it couldn’t be Adam Blessing trying to sneak in—he’s right here!”
She pulled me out of the phone booth. “Adam, tell Mr. Baird who you are, for heaven’s sake! There’s a rumor you’ve just broken in through the equipment room!”
Mr. Baird had stopped in his tracks. He said to the police, “Bring the boy down in the equipment room up here.” Then he turned to me. “Adam, is that you?”
“It’s him,” Ella Early said. “I spoke to him earlier.”
“Then speak up, Adam!”
I sagged against the phone booth and stared at Mr. Baird through the holes in my sweater.
“You have a lot of explaining to do, Adam,” he said. “Come to my office.”
“It wasn’t him involved in any of this,” Ella Early said.
“You stay out of this, Ella,” said Mr. Baird. “You don’t know the half of this.”
“I know the gossip.” she said. “I’m not deaf yet. Adam,” she said, trying to help me move by gently taking my arm, “tell him you’ve been here all evening. They say you’ve been at the hospital with some . . . some hoyden who swallowed pills.”
“Come to my office, Adam,” said Mr. Baird.
I was watching what was headed toward us from way down at the other end of the corridor. It was Adam. There was a policeman on either side of him. He was carrying a fur coat and a bl
onde wig. He had obviously tried to sneak in through the equipment room, leave the coat and wig there, and then somehow signal me to change clothes with him.
There was a crowd beginning to collect in the hall. “You have nothing to worry about,” Ella Early said to me gently, “if you just tell the truth.”
I hugged Sir Walter Raleigh’s head close to my heart.
“Adam?” Ella Early persisted.
Romeo Hardin spoke up from the crowd. “That’s not Adam, Miss Early, there’s Adam!” He stood there grinning with satisfaction as Adam approached, with both policemen holding him firmly now, as though he were an escaped convict.
Ty walked across to me. “Milton?” he said. “I’m taking Christine home. You’re taking Diane Wattley home. Get it?”
Mystery Man made one last horrendous gesture with all his strength and power. I kicked Ty Hardin hard, so hard he let out a yelp of surprise and pain.
“What feels right is right,” I said.
“You’re not Milton Merrensky!” he said, dancing around on one leg. “You’re a girl!”
I saw Queen Elizabeth then, her face screwed up like a small baby’s face a moment before it began to wail. I tossed Sir Walter’s head into the phone booth, and I unfastened my long cloak.
Christine let loose, orchestrating the hysteria which was fast filling the school corridor.
“Blow your nose on this,” I said, dropping my cloak over her head as I passed her.
Then I joined the death procession to Mr. Baird’s office.
From the Journal of A.
I spent Friday night at Mr. Baird’s house, and Saturday morning we drove Electric Socket to the Burlington Airport. Later in the day I went back to my grandfather’s house to pack. It was my first chance to call Christine. She answered the phone herself, and I said, “This is me. Adam. There’s bad news.”
“Everyone’s heard and read the news by now,” she said. “By now you’re almost as well known as your father.”
“I don’t mean that news,” I said. “I mean the news that I’ve been expelled.”
“And everyone’s seen your picture with that person,” she said, ignoring what I’d just told her.
She was talking about the picture of Electric Socket leaving the hospital on my arm. Mr. Baird had ducked out of camera range. The picture was in the early edition of The Evening Star with the caption:
Son Keeps Famous Father’s Flame Going
“I feel sorry for her,” I told Christine.
“I feel sorry for you, Adam.”
“Oh, I’ll get into another school.”
“I don’t mean that, specifically. I mean everything in general. I mean about who your father is. It really makes me appreciate my own sweet, uncomplicated father.”
“My father has to handle a lot,” I said. “He’s always under a lot of pressure.” I hadn’t been able to reach my father. He was out of the country on special assignment. (I wondered what important meeting they’d call him out of to give him the news, or if the reporters would spring it on him as he was rushing to his limousine.) I’d talked to Billie Kay and my grandfather in California. They’d wired money for me to join them.
“And I really appreciate my own normal homelife now,” Christine continued.
“Well, I’m glad of that. I’m glad you’re not mad.”
“There’s nothing for me to be mad at. I’m just sorry for you.”
“Don’t be sorry for me,” I said. “I’m not that bad off.”
“I can’t help being sorry for you. I could cry when I think about you, Adam.”
“Listen,” I said, “not everyone would be happy having a sweet uncomplicated father and a normal homelife. Did you ever think of that? Maybe I like being his son, did you ever think of that?”
“Then how come you didn’t admit whose son you are?”
“What?”
“How come you pretended to be someone else if you’re so happy being his son?”
“I didn’t say I was happy being his son,” I said. “I just said not everyone would be happy having a sweet, uncomplicated father.” I was thinking of something Electric Socket told me just before she boarded the plane to go back to Hollywood. She said, “Even though things didn’t work out between your father and me, Adam, I wouldn’t have missed knowing him for the world. He’s not an ordinary man. Honey; he’s not your average Tom, Dick or Harry. You can’t expect your dad to act in an ordinary, average way.”
I told Christine, “Not everyone is an ordinary, average man.”
“I’ll take my father any day,” she said.
“Why don’t we leave our fathers out of the discussion?” I said, because I hadn’t called her up to talk about or defend my father, and for some reason I could feel myself becoming really steamed when she said she pitied me because I was his son.
“That’s impossible—to leave our fathers out of the discussion,” she said, “under the circumstances.”
“I don’t want to go on and on about it,” I said. “Will I see you before I go?”
“I can’t.”
“Your father?”
“I’ve promised him,” she said. “But you can write, Adam. He doesn’t care if we write.”
“He’s all heart,” I said.
She said, “Adam, he’s a father—you don’t understand! He’s looking out for me like a father does.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, you’re his major responsibility. I mean, some people are just fathers . . . or daughters . . . or sons . . . and that’s it.” I was thinking of myself, not just Dr. Cutler. So far in my life all I’d been was someone’s son, even when I was so busy pretending I wasn’t his son. I seemed to have had just one role in life: son of.
Christine said, “I wouldn’t want my father to be any way but the way he is.”
I suppose we could have gone on for hours comparing our fathers. I felt like asking Christine just what the hell her sweet, uncomplicated father had ever been called on to do in his life but worm people’s dogs, spay their cats and prescribe remedies for constipation and diarrhea in four-legged creatures.
I mean, my father had been chosen to address the United Nations, sat at dinner with heads of state, and slept under the same roof with presidents, kings and foreign ministers!
But it would only have sounded like sour grapes, and I didn’t feel bitter or argumentative. Instead, I felt like doing a lot of thinking about my old man, which would take a long time, because he was so much more than just my old man.
I said, “I can’t think of anything else to say, Christine.”
“I understand. Write to me, Adam.”
“Okay,” I said, because you can’t answer “What about?” when someone says “Write to me.” But what would I have written about to Christine? We never really even knew each other.
“Good-bye, Adam.”
She said it, so I didn’t have to.
Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.
“Brenda Belle?” he said, “This is me. Adam. I spent the night at Mr. Baird’s.”
“What’s his house like?” I said. “Has his wife really got a wart on the tip of her nose?”
“His house is all right,” he said. “Yes, she really has a wart on the end of her nose. . . . I’m sorry you were put on probation, Brenda Belle. I’ve been expelled.”
“I hate him!” I said. “A lot!”
“He really feels badly,” he said. “He says he has to do it, for the sake of the school. . . and the Board of Directors.”
“For the sake of the school!” I shouted. “The school ought to be thankful someone like your father would let you throw spitballs at his blackboards! What is that school ever going to be known for? Nobody important ever went to that school! That school hasn’t graduated anybody but a bunch of Joe Schmucks and Nancy Nowheres! That is a real lemon high school!”
Adam said, “Well anyway, I’ll be heading out to the coast tonight to join my grandfather.”
“Winging it to the coast, huh?” I laugh
ed to keep from crying.
“Yeah,” he chuckled.
“That was a neat picture of you and Electric Socket,” I said. “My mother said she took those pills for a publicity stunt, to get her name in all the papers.”
“That’s not true,” Adam said. “She really fell for my father.”
“He’s too restless a man to settle down with one woman, my aunt says.”
“I guess so,” Adam said.
“My aunt says a man like your father has too much on his mind to think seriously about romance.”
“He’s not your ordinary, average man,” Adam said.
“I’m being punished,” I said, “for being put on probation. I wish I could see you before you go.”
Adam could probably tell from the breaks in my voice that I was on the verge of bawling. He said, “Don’t feel bad, Brenda Belle. We’ll write. Maybe you’ll come out to the coast to visit me.”
“My aunt would like your father’s autograph,” I said. It was a lie. I wanted it.
“I’ll send her an autographed photograph,” Adam said.
“Tell him to write on it ‘For Brenda Belle Blossom.’”
Adam laughed. He said, “I’m not going to say good-bye.”
“You don’t think I am?” I said.
So we both hung up without saying it.
From the Journal of A.
CHUCK FROM VERMONT’S
ICE CREAM BOAT featuring
44 Boat Flavors New England Baked Beans
Storm Chili Free Advice on Animal Care
and
BILLIE KAY CASE OF SCREEN FAME
BEHIND THE SCOOPER-DOOPER
The franchise people were by again last night to chew out my grandfather for deviating from the tested formula for a successful Ice Cream Boat. My grandfather and Billie Kay operate the 98th branch, and it is the only one pushing things besides ice cream. Even though my grandfather is doing a tremendous business, the franchise people are against any innovations which do not originate in the home office.
“What did you tell them?” Billie Kay asked. We were all having breakfast on Billie Kay’s patio. It was warm this morning, a typical California day in May, slightly smoggy, but the sun was out. The apartment my grandfather and I rent from Billie Kay overlooks the patio and her backyard, filled with orange and avocado trees and Janice’s catnip patch.